Data analysis

Regulatory and competition authorities are demanding in the evidence they require. Questions about market definition and market power are unavoidably empirical; they are best addressed through systematic analysis. Econometric and statistical methods provide a rich set of tools for providing robust answers.

These techniques are increasingly used for everyday business decision-making. Econometrics can be used to benchmark performance and identify inefficiency. Customer data can be mined to provide insight into their behaviour, allowing suppliers to understand the needs of their customers better and be smarter in setting prices.

DotEcon has undertaken extensive econometric and statistical analysis both as part of regulatory and competition proceedings and to assist business decision-making. For example, we have:

conducted one of the few studies that rigorously identifies substitution between fixed and mobile phones;

used conjoint analysis to understand what customers value about different payment methods;

used hedonic pricing techniques to measure the benefits to the UK from regulation of ultra-wide band technology;

used econometric models to predict prices for radio spectrum in auctions.

We are used to dealing with multiple data formats and integrating with our clients’ systems to extract workable datasets. We use state-of-the-art econometric and statistical software and develop our own software for the non-standard problems that frequently arise in real world applications. We work with leading market research companies to develop surveys to understand customer behaviour and inform public policy choices.

We understand the importance of making these powerful techniques work to deliver the answers that clients need. This means clearly identifying the issues to be investigated, gathering the right data and drawing out the implications of the analysis in a non-technical form.

Spectrum awards database

DotEcon maintains an extensive data set of prices paid for radio spectrum in different bands across the world. The data has been used for establishing reserve price benchmarks, and has festured in academic research. Click here to find out more about DotEcon's spectrum awards database.

Analysing choices

In our work we have made extensive use of conjoint analysis in order to model and predict consumer choices. This approach aims at building up the evaluation of choices from the value of specific attributes (e.g. shop opening hours, proximity, range of products stocked, quality of service, price level etc. for the choice between retail outlets), and estimate the contribution that these individual attributes make from a series of hypothetical choices presented to respondents of a survey. Its great strength is that it explicitly faces respondents with trade-offs, and allows the researcher to assess the consistency of responses. This produces more robust results than simple stated preference surveys in which respondents are being asked to put a value on certain attributes.

Examples of how conjoint analysis can be used in the context of competition cases or public policy design can be found here and here.